European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Twenty-two months ago, I sat in this Chamber listening to arguments from both sides of the House about the triggering of article 50. It was a difficult decision, but I voted against that motion at the conclusion of the debate, because I was not convinced that the Government had a proper plan for Brexit. I take no satisfaction in being proved right. The Prime Minister’s failure to unite the country, focusing instead on trying to satisfy the warring factions in her own party, is a terrible failure of leadership just when our disunited kingdom really needed that leadership.

At the 2017 general election, I reassured my constituents that, while I respected the referendum result, I would not give any Prime Minister a blank cheque. I promised to stand up for my constituents and fight for the best deal for Nottingham South—one that would not leave them worse off, less secure at work and with fewer opportunities in the future. This deal does not deliver on those promises. Conservative Members remain bitterly divided about what kind of Brexit they want. They have failed to build a consensus within their party, within Parliament and within the country. They have not listened, and the people whom I represent, particularly those on low incomes, are likely to suffer most if we leave the EU on the Prime Minister’s terms.

As UN special rapporteur Philip Alston warned two weeks ago in his report on extreme poverty and human rights, the lowest paid will bear the brunt of the economic fallout from Brexit. My constituents were promised “the sunlit uplands”, hundreds of millions of pounds every week for our NHS, the easiest trade deal ever, taking back control of our borders and a return to sovereignty. We now know what the reality looks like. As the Chancellor admitted, our country will be worse off under all Brexit scenarios. Far from delivering more money for schools, to tackle poverty and for our NHS, we will all be poorer, with fewer opportunities, and our public services will suffer. They did not put that on the side of a bus.

The deal that the Prime Minister has reached satisfies no one and seems increasingly unlikely to command a majority in this House, and yet she is in complete denial. She has repeatedly refused to explain what she will do when her deal is defeated. That is utterly reckless, putting the future of my constituents and our country at risk.

I intend to vote against this deal because it fails to protect the interests of the people, the businesses and the city that I represent. Nottingham South is home to two world-class universities. They are vital to our city’s success and matter deeply to the thousands of students and staff I represent. The University of Nottingham told me that the

“impact of the decision to leave the EU has already had negative implications for the University. We have noticed a decline in student numbers at postgraduate level. EU staff report feelings of demotivation and alienation in a country they have chosen to call home and have made a massive contribution towards. We have noticed a number of examples where industry collaborators have put investment into joint R&D programmes on hold or have cancelled them. If the UK’s participation and status in the Horizon Europe scientific research programme isn’t confirmed in time, then there is a significant risk that we and the major businesses and SMEs that work with us will be locked out of the major part of this programme going forwards.”

It is not only our universities that are threatened. The Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust recently published reports on the impact that Brexit will have both on its staff and on the supply of medicines. Thanks to this Government’s cuts to nurse training bursaries and the failure to value NHS staff, we have a recruitment crisis. Non-British EU staff make up 4.4% of the hospitals workforce—690 staff, including 214 nurses and midwives. These are people we desperately want and need working in our NHS but, as reported in the Nottingham Post yesterday, despite immediate reassurances issued by the trust following the referendum, these EU citizens

“feel that they have been forgotten and are unsettled and anxious because of the uncertainty of their employment due to Brexit.”

It is no wonder when they are characterised as “queue jumpers”. The trust also reports that a no-deal Brexit may affect the timely supply of goods, services and medicines, which could disrupt health and social care services.

Businesses across Nottingham, in both manufacturing and services, are equally worried about recruiting skilled staff, about their supply chains and about access to markets. This is not what my leave-voting constituents were promised. Here is what one of my constituents from the Clifton estate says:

“We are headed for a Brexit that nobody voted for...a million miles away from what was promised in 2016. It threatens jobs, businesses and hospitals here in our constituency; it will mean no end to austerity for years to come...it will do nothing to deal with…the real challenges facing our local area. In fact, it will make dealing with those problems harder.”

The answer to those challenges is a Labour Government who are determined to tackle the poverty, insecurity and fear that drove so many of my constituents to vote leave. A general election would give people a real opportunity to have their say, not only on this bad deal but on this bad Government, but if we cannot have an election, maybe it is time to ask the people what they think. Parliament does not support this deal, and Parliament will not support a catastrophic no deal. If the Prime Minister will not listen to Parliament, maybe it is time to listen to the people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

It is unfortunate that I rise to speak against the approval of this withdrawal agreement, which does not represent the best deal for the United Kingdom or fulfil the spirit of the referendum result. It ties us to EU rules and regulations for the long term while removing our ability to influence those rules. It ties us to a backstop arrangement that would create different circumstances for Northern Ireland compared with the rest of the UK and that we cannot leave of our own volition. It ties our hands to prevent us taking advantage of the full extent of independence over our international trade policy. For that reason, I feel that it is worst of all worlds; it is a state of purgatory, which, as the Attorney General made clear yesterday, has no fixed end point.

In her Lancaster House speech, the Prime Minister was clear: she said simply that we would seek to negotiate a bold and ambitious free trade deal with Europe that would also give us the ability to strike out around the world. She was honest with us, and did not pretend that this would have all the same benefits of full membership. We were leaving so things would have to be different, but we could still have a positive relationship built around free trade. She aimed to take back control of our money, our borders and our laws. She was quite right that those were at the heart of why people voted to leave. She said that no deal was better than a bad deal, and that if the EU would not give us something that worked for the whole United Kingdom, we could walk away and succeed on our own merits.

Looking back, it is hard to understand how we have ended up here, particularly when our manifesto in 2017 committed us to so much more. My Labour predecessor in Mansfield held the seat for 30 years, longer than I have been alive, but, more recently, the constituency has shown its appetite for change. Local people voted Conservative for the first time in 2017, sick of decades of representatives moaning about the past, but having no plan for the future. They also voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU in 2016, fed up with being forgotten by the establishment and eager to take back control of their destiny.

I am under no illusion that each of my constituents—in fact, most people in the country—have dissected the details and come to a conclusion on their preferred customs arrangements; some have, but the vast majority have not. That does not mean that they did not know what they wanted when they were voting. I have had this conversation on literally thousands of occasions now with local people who felt—to coin a phrase—that leave meant leave. It meant not being part of the institutions, not being tied to their rules, and not paying into their budgets. We were leaving, in the English dictionary sense, which is “to depart from permanently, to cease to be a part of” the European Union. I think that it is a fundamental misunderstanding by many, not just in this place, but out there, that it might be possible to make it look like leaving while actually seeking continuity. At Lancaster House, the Prime Minister did not phrase things in that way. She accepted that our relationship would change, that it would be a different and a looser one, and that it would give us the freedoms that we wanted. At that time, I am fairly certain—and the votes back it up—that she had the support of the majority in this House for that kind of deal.

I draw the comparison, an overly simplistic one perhaps, between the referendum and a game of cards—a choice between stick or twist. Voters knew, and they were told each and every day throughout that campaign, of the risks of voting to leave. They were told all the horror stories. Things were overblown and exaggerated, just as they are now, but they voted to leave anyway, because the status quo does not work for them. In the choice of stick or twist, they opted for twist, recognising the consequences and the uncertainty, but wanting to take that risk in order to seek new and different opportunities. Having ticked a few boxes that looked a bit like leaving, they did not want to try to replicate the status quo; they wanted change, because they felt that the status quo did not work for them. We cannot deliver an outcome that meets the “spirit” of the referendum result if we remain tied, possibly indefinitely, to the institution that we promised to leave and if we compromise on all the things that mattered in that decision. It cannot be boiled down to a spreadsheet with data on economic forecasts; the decision was so much bigger than that. It was about the heart as well as the head; the outcome was for change.

[Lilian Greenwood]

I am listening with interest to one of my Nottinghamshire neighbours. When the hon. Gentleman’s constituents voted to leave, does he think that they voted to be poorer, because we have heard that every Brexit scenario will leave people in Nottinghamshire poorer?

[Ben Bradley]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. People did not see it in those terms. Part of the fundamental misunderstanding of the Government and of this House is that people saw it solely as an economic transaction. As I have just said, it was about more than that. Despite the forecasts and the doom and gloom that is discussed in this place and in the media, the vast majority of people who come to me—75% in local polling—say “Reject this deal and seek a looser relationship.”